Employee Turnover Analysis

Employees with 3 or more different managers in a year are up to 75% more likely to leave your company Yesterday, we saw that only ~50% of employees in Pave’s dataset have kept the same manager for a full year. Today, let’s go one step deeper and look at the impact of “manager thrash” on employee attrition. _____________ As a quick caveat, the reported turnover rates include both voluntary and involuntary (as well as regrettable and non-regrettable) attrition. And yes, this includes layoffs too. _____________ 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗰𝗿𝗼𝘀𝘀 𝗣𝗮𝘃𝗲’𝘀 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮𝘀𝗲𝘁? • 𝗢𝗻𝗲 consistent manager over the past 12 months => Attrition rates between 𝟭𝟲% 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝟮𝟬% depending on company stage. • 𝗧𝘄𝗼 managers over the past 12 months => Attrition rates between 𝟮𝟭% 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝟮𝟳%. • 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗼𝗿 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 managers over the past 12 months => Attrition rates between 𝟮𝟱% 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝟯𝟰%. _____________ 𝗧𝘄𝗼 𝗽𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝘂𝘁: 1️⃣ In general, the more managers an employee has, the more likely they are to leave the company. 2️⃣ Attrition rates are usually highest at early stage startups and gradually decrease as companies mature. ________________ 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗧𝗼𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗥𝗲𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗛𝗥 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀: ✅ Re-orgs, performance management, and layoffs are somewhat inevitable in the world of company building. However, be cognizant of the tangible impact that “manager thrash” has on employee attrition. In particular, I encourage you to run a cohort analysis around how much manager thrash your top performers have undergone over the past 12 months as a way to proactively predict attrition risk org-by-org. I’d also call out that it’s important to consider whether or not attrition spikes caused by “manager thrash” are due to causation or correlation with other forces. Think critically here. Is it the disruption, inconsistent expectations, or something else? #pave #orgchart #benchmarks

You aren't losing top talent to your competitors. You are losing them to your own culture. 💡 New global research from the career space, iHire, reveals a disturbing paradox: despite massive corporate investments in well-being programs, toxic workplace behaviors are surging. ➡️ Employees are actively fleeing environments that tolerate poor management, lack of communication, and unchecked psychological friction. If you are only tracking your general attrition rate, you are blind to the real problem. You are just refilling a bucket with a massive hole in the bottom. To fix retention, we have to stop measuring total headcount loss and start measuring the toxicity premium. 📊 Introducing 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗙𝗿𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗲𝘅 (𝗖𝗙𝗜). This simple metric quantifies exactly how much of your talent attrition is being driven by internal cultural failure: 📐 CFI = (Exit Interviews Citing Toxic Culture)\ (Total Voluntary Resignations) X 100 🚩 If you have 100 voluntary resignations, and 45 of them cite bad management or a toxic environment in their exit data, your CFI is 45%. That means nearly half of your turnover is an entirely preventable, expensive self-inflicted wound. Is your HR team actively tracking the cost of cultural friction, or are you just guessing why people leave? Dave Ulrich #ToxicWorkplace #Leadership #RetentionStrategy

📊 How much is good job design worth to the employee? There's a huge literature linking job design to psychosocial risk, mental health, and employee wellbeing. But it can be harder to link job design to financial outcomes. This is partly because the returns are diffuse across outcomes like turnover, absenteeism, productivity, and mental health claims, and also because they take time to show up. This means that people-related investments don't always get the same consideration as policies with a clearer ROI. I've written before about quantifying the financial value of job satisfaction in terms of replacement cost savings for an organisation (link in comments). In this analysis, I look at the issue from the employee's perspective. Using data from the HILDA survey, I examined the following question: How much more would someone need to be paid to reduce their chance of leaving their job by the same amount as a 1-point improvement (on a 7-point scale) in a given job characteristic? To answer this question, I first estimated how much salary and each job characteristic affect turnover. I then identified the salary change that matches the retention impact of a 1-point improvement in the characteristic. Here's what the results showed: 1️⃣ The most valuable things are interest, learning, and initiative. A 1-point increase in a job involving “a variety of interesting things” was associated with a retention impact equivalent to a $25k pay rise. Learning new skills, taking initiative, and using many skills and abilities were all in the $15k–$20k range. 2️⃣ Autonomy was worth between $6k and $10k. Having a say about what happens in your job was worth about $10k. Freedom over how and what you do in your work came in at about $6.5k. According to this analysis, having flexibility in working times was worth a little less (around $3k). 3️⃣ Stress and monotony had a retention impact equivalent to a cut in pay. Work stress was associated with higher turnover by an amount comparable to taking $10k–$16k off someone's salary. Jobs which require doing the same things repeatedly were equivalent to a $12k paycut. Of course, these are only associations, not causal inferences. All we can say here is that people who have more of certain characteristics tend to leave their jobs at a lower rate than expected given their salary. Also the job characteristics themselves are correlated, so their combined effects aren’t necessarily additive (you’d need a different analysis to assess this). Still, I think analyses like these are useful for communicating to stakeholders the value that people initiatives can provide. It frames the initiative in the same terms decision makers use to evaluate other policies, so they can compare apples with apples. Check out more research insights like this here: https://lnkd.in/gnbvqG-b #PeopleAnalytics #PsychosocialRisk #JobDesign #EmployeeRetention #OrganisationalPsychology #WorkplaceWellbeing #FutureOfWork

Replacing people is easy. Understanding why they leave is leadership. I’ve seen organizations move quickly to fill vacancies and feel relieved when the position is closed. Yet a few months later, the same role opens again. The pattern repeats, and the conversation stays focused on hiring rather than on what is driving people away. From my experience, exits rarely happen suddenly. They build quietly over time. A lack of growth, unclear direction, inconsistent leadership, or effort that goes unrecognized. By the time someone decides to leave, the decision has usually been forming for months. Workplace research consistently points to this reality. Gallup’s latest findings show that a large share of employees who leave do so because of management-related factors such as lack of development, poor communication, or feeling undervalued. In other words, most exits are not about the job itself. They are about the experience of doing the job. I’ve seen this firsthand. In one situation, a strong performer resigned, and the immediate response was to replace the role quickly. When we stepped back and spoke to the team more openly, a different picture emerged. The issue was not workload alone. It was unclear priorities and limited feedback. Once that was addressed, not only did retention improve, but performance improved as well. Replacing people treats the symptom. Understanding people addresses the cause. When leaders focus only on hiring, they maintain the cycle. When they focus on why people leave, they begin to change it. Retention is not driven by policy alone. It is shaped by everyday leadership behavior. How feedback is given. How growth is supported. How effort is recognized. How trust is built. These are the factors people respond to long before they consider leaving. “People don’t leave organizations as often as they leave experiences.” Strong leaders don’t wait for exit interviews to understand what went wrong. They pay attention while people are still there. Because in the long run, fixing the environment is more effective than repeatedly replacing the people within it. What is one change organizations can make today to reduce unnecessary turnover? LinkedIn LinkedIn News LinkedIn News India #Leadership #EmployeeRetention #WorkCulture #LinkedInNews

Most leaders are surprised when a high performer resigns. They shouldn't be. In my experience, employees rarely make the decision to leave overnight. The decision is usually made months earlier. It happens when their ideas are consistently dismissed. It happens when they deliver results but only hear feedback when something goes wrong. It happens when accountability feels uneven, trust starts to erode, and employees begin questioning whether their contributions really matter. By the time the resignation letter arrives, the real problem has been developing for quite some time. What concerns me is that many organizations still treat turnover as a recruiting problem. Often, it's a leadership problem, a culture problem, or a people risk problem. Every departure carries a cost. Work slows down. Institutional knowledge walks out the door. Remaining employees absorb additional responsibilities. Managers spend time replacing talent instead of developing it. The impact extends far beyond filling an open position. That's why I encourage leaders to pay attention to the signals that appear long before someone resigns:  The employee who stops contributing ideas. The high performer who becomes disengaged. The manager with recurring turnover on their team. The growing reluctance to speak up, challenge decisions, or offer feedback. These are not engagement issues. They're early indicators of people risk. The dashboard is usually the last place the problem shows up. By the time turnover appears in a report, employees have often been communicating the issue for months through their behavior. People Risk Is Business Risk. Organizations that retain great talent don't do it because they have better retention programs. They do it because they have leaders who create environments where people can contribute, grow, and succeed. Retention is rarely about keeping people. It's about creating reasons for them to stay.

I've been in the recruiting field long enough to remember when staying at a job less than 5 years was a red flag. What's changed? Employees today value growth, purpose, and flexibility more than loyalty. Additionally, the recent labor market has made switching jobs easier and more rewarding, while organizations often fail to provide the career development, culture, or leadership that keeps people engaged. We can see the result, but why is it different? Shift in Employee Expectations & Career Mindsets ➡️ 📉 Economic downturns & instability such as the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 global pandemic taught employees not to rely on loyalty for job security. Out of necessity, companies downsized, outsourced, or automated roles, breaking the long-standing psychological contract of lifetime or long-term employment security. 🎲 Millennials and Gen Z grew up watching parents endure layoffs or unfulfilling work, so they were influenced to prioritize purpose, growth, and balance over stability. 🏆 Social platforms and information access like LinkedIn and Glassdoor normalized career changes by highlighting opportunities and reducing the stigma of short tenures, shifting the vibe from disloyalty to ambition. Market Dynamics & Job Opportunities ➡️ 🌐 The rise of remote work, digital recruitment platforms, and gig apps expanded access to jobs beyond geography and offered perks such as flexibility, autonomy and personalized experience. 🚨 Talent shortages in many industries increased competition for skilled workers, leading to aggressive recruiting and more opportunities to choose from. 🧠 With the shift toward a knowledge economy, work became more skill-based and less location-reliant so employees with in-demand expertise could easily move to higher paying and/or more flexible opportunities. Workplace Factors Driving Turnover ➡️ ✂️ Many organizations cut middle management layers with an aim to be more efficient, limiting visible career ladders which often required employees to leave in order to advance. 💢 Increased pace & pressure of work: Technology and accessibility expectations blurred work/life boundaries, leading to burnout. 👁️🗨️ Many managers were promoted for technical skill, not people leadership. Poor management quality has become more visible and less tolerated (particularly with social channels and global audiences), especially in a values-driven workforce. 🔍 Sites like Glassdoor, Comparably, and PayScale made organizational issues more visible (bad culture, low pay, lack of development) harder to hide, empowering more proactive career decision making for candidates and employees. Parting thought: The youngest wave of talent entering the workforce often gets blamed for what makes running a business more difficult, but it's important to remember, they are a product of generations before who created the environment they enter as adults.

After analyzing turnover data across thousands of restaurant locations, I've been diving deep into what I call the "ghost employee" problem -- new hires who go through the onboarding process then disappear within their first 90 days. The financial impact is bigger than most operators realize. That's in large part because many don't even count these departures in their turnover metrics. I've been talking to operators who straight up exclude ghost employees from their turnover calculations - "We don't include people who quit during training." I think this is in large part because it's psychologically easier to dismiss these departures as "bad hires" rather than acknowledge the systematic failure in their onboarding process. But those ghost employees consumed real resources, real manager time, and real training dollars regardless of how briefly they stayed. We all know turnover is expensive, but the industry has been surprisingly vague about putting real numbers on what it costs when employees quit in their first 90 days. Cornell University's hospitality research team found the full cost of turnover hits $6,000 (and change) per employee when you account for recruiting, selection, training, administrative overhead, and productivity loss during replacement. Black Box Intelligence™ uses different methodology but gets similar numbers - $2,300 for hourly staff, over $10K for managers, $17K for GMs. The key insight comes from HourWork's analysis of 8,000 QSR locations: only 54% of new hires survive their first 90 days, which means 46% of your training investment generates zero return. For a 25-person restaurant running at industry-standard 135% turnover hires 34 people annually. With 46% early departure rate, that's 16 ghost employees per year. Even using conservative estimates of $2,300 per hourly employee, you're looking at $37,000 in direct costs alone. Per location. But here's what's really interesting. The same Black Box data shows operators in identical markets maintaining 50-75% turnover while competitors struggle with 135% or higher. Same labor market, same pressures - totally different outcomes. The difference isn't compensation or benefits - it's how they handle those first 90 days. We've seen this with customers like Life's Food: A Five Guys Franchise, who cut turnover 50% by replacing traditional onboarding with structured, mobile-first training that actually engages people instead of overwhelming them with information dumps. The real question isn't whether turnover is expensive - it's whether you're measuring the right things. Most operators track overall turnover rates, but the actual profit leak is in that first 90-day window where you're getting zero ROI on training investment. Once you calculate your ghost employee cost and compare it to the price of proper onboarding systems, the business case becomes obvious. The operators winning on retention aren't spending more on training - they're spending smarter.

Don't let a 0.9% resignation rate fool you. Visier Inc.’s May 2026 data shows a four-year low - slightly below the usual 1% seasonal average. But low turnover isn't always a sign of high engagement. Sometimes, it’s just a sign of a cautious market "waiting out" the AI transformation. Leaders must look at the tension behind any number - even those that seem innocent or unthreatening. What our resignation report also tells us is this: 📉 The youngest workers (20–25) still have the highest churn at 2.9%. Instead of using AI to redesign entry-level roles, organizations are using it to replace them. Young workers may not be leaving the workforce—they may be leaving stagnant companies for competitors that offer AI-augmented career paths. 👩🏫 Individual contributors are resigning at 3x the rate of managers. If your frontline is in motion while your management layer stays put, there could be a structural disconnect between the people designing the AI strategy and the people tasked with executing it. ❤️🔥 The AI "Stay" Factor: workers are more likely to stay when their employer has a clear AI growth plan. People aren't just looking for a pay check; they’re looking for AI-resilience. #Leadership #PeopleAnalytics #FutureOfWork #AI #RetentionStrategy

Despite the external praise that some companies get for having a "world-class lean business system", there is an underlying truth they don’t want to confront. These companies struggle to fill their continuous improvement (CI) roles from within and have high turnover. They often have a slew of job openings and resort to recruiting external CI talent to fill the void. Here’s why this should raise concerns: 🔍 Lack of Internal Development: These companies fail to develop, grow, and promote CI leaders internally, indicating a failure in nurturing talent and providing career progression opportunities. 🔍 High Turnover Rates: The revolving door of CI professionals suggests deeper issues, signaling a toxic work environment or unrealistic job expectations. 🔍 Limited Upward Mobility: CI roles are often seen as dead-end careers. Executives stereotype CI leaders as only capable of facilitating kaizen events, rather than recognizing their potential to lead businesses, stifling career growth. 🔍 “Fake” CI Culture: When the CI culture is perceived as insincere and overly bureaucratic, it fails to attract and retain committed internal candidates, demotivating employees and hindering true continuous improvement. 🔍 External Recruitment Reliance: Over-reliance on external recruitment is a symptom of systemic issues. Companies unable to promote from within lack strategic vision and employee development. As part of my role in recruiting CI professionals, I routinely see the same companies come up in terms of CI professionals looking to depart for greener pastures, and these are the reasons they give us. 🛡️ To protect yourself from falling into this high turnover trap, consider these tips: 📑 Research Company Culture: Look for reviews and testimonials from current and former employees. A high turnover rate is often a sign of deeper issues. 📅 Ask About Development Programs: During the interview process, inquire about the company’s commitment to developing CI leaders. Ask for specific examples of internal promotions and success stories. 🔗 Understand Turnover Reasons: If possible, find out why previous CI professionals left the company. This information can provide a clearer picture of the work environment and expectations. 💬 Clarify CI Culture: Ask how the company implements its CI culture and how it supports continuous improvement initiatives. A genuine CI culture will have clear processes and committed leadership. 🕵️♂️ Speak with Current Employees: Networking with current employees can provide an honest perspective on the company’s CI culture and work environment. By being diligent and asking the right questions, you can identify companies that truly value continuous improvement and avoid those with high turnover and fake CI cultures.